Grandad as a granite dolphin
I think it was last year, after my grandparents passed away, that I dreamt I was walking along the combe towards poltreen house (the house my grandparents lived in my whole life). Every time we reached the wooded coombe where the trees fell in towards each other from either side of the road forming a canopy and creating a cool shady area my family would always sing the line ‘o o bosque mexico’. I think because the first time we visited my grandparents after moving from Mexico my brother made that connection. Bosque means forrest. In my dream I was walking around the edge of the house and running my hands along the cool granite stones of the wall, I remembered being a child and feeling the same textures and temperature of the wall on sleepy warm afternoons.
As I came past the edge of the house and out through the little gate next to the garage, on the ground by the low wall across from me were a bunch of discarded objects, a cute knitted doll like the one my mum had, some cups and saucers, they must have belonged to Granny and Grandad. I picked them up to take them back with me. The new owner came out of the house and I told her my grandparents used to live here. She was warm and she told me that my Grandad was out the back. She took me behind the wall were the objects were. In real life this was past the garage and sheds where I had helped grandad put the lids on the jars of the honey from his bees. It was always dense overgown bushes and the back of someone else’s house, but in the dream it became an open area surrounded by trees, in the center was a kind of display. It was manmade but it felt like nature had happened to it, plants grew through it as though it had been there for years. There was a little figurine of what seemed to be a granite dolphn, it was so weathered that the carving of the dolphin had been softly worn away so you could barely make out the shape, pale green lichen covered the surface. Sure enough it was him, I held him in my hands and he started speaking to me. I told him how much I missed him, he was kind and lovely but I don’t remember what he said.
I was thinking about when Natsumi did tactical sign language with me and how she explained that we hold so much memory in our body and also in motion too. It’s funny how touch also holds so much memory and how little I have thought about that.